Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  The rest of the journal is devoted to reports and correspondence about case histories and to explanations of the laws of the universe. Among the case histories is one of a lady blind from birth (though familiar with lettering through Braille) who, when mesmerized, could read from a book, though she was even better at describing her internal organs than external things. Although Sunderland reports such cases, he carefully distances himself from the many over-credulous accounts of clairvoyance, visions of the future, etc. The whole tone of the journal is cautious and crusading. For instance, Sunderland regrets the horde of popular entertainers who are sullying the name of magnetism, because one cannot expect a country brought up on such fare to place much value on the medical use of magnetism; he therefore uses the pages of the journal to report case histories which provide evidence for its medical value, and calls on moral men to take up magnetism.

  The combination of enthusiasm and circumspection evinced by Sunderland's journal was to be echoed many times. In the nature of things, little evidence remains of the work of the shysters and travelling showmen, but this constant circumspection shows how prevalent they were. In the eyes of all these writers, the showmen were in danger of muddying the waters. Sunderland and the rest wanted to establish mesmerism as a valid and valuable medical practice, based on solid, scientific principles, and their defensive tone is their main means of making it clear to the medical men that they were not to be confused with their flamboyant cousins.

  Among the new, scientific practitioners were men like Colonel William Stone of New York, a former ambassador to the Netherlands. Although he was converted to mesmerism by the remarkable exploits of Loraine Brackett, a clairvoyant who had been partially cured by her mesmerizing doctor, George Capron of Providence, of blindness and dumbness (caused by a blow on the head), he eschewed the more melodramatic side of things, quietly experimented on the phenomena in his home and published a careful account of them. Another responsible researcher was J.K. Mitchell (1798–1858), who in the 1840s conducted a series of sober experiments on mesmerism, looking for changes in skin temperature and pulse rate, finding what proportion of the population was susceptible and so on. He also performed a number of dental operations under hypnotic anaesthesia. He failed to find evidence of paranormal abilities or of magnetic fluid, the latter because the mesmerist's energy does not become depleted, as one would expect if the fluidic theory were correct. Even if there were such a fluid, he doubted that metals and other substances could be charged by it. He suggested that the operator brings about changes in his own nervous system which then somehow effect the subject's nervous system. Up until this last vague sentence, Mitchell seems like a forerunner of academic researchers, long before the foundation of the first psychology departments in American universities in the 1880s.

  The fact that both Dods and Sunderland began their lives as ministers (Dods was a Universalist, Sunderland a Methodist) tells us immediately that Americans were attracted to the religious dimension of animal magnetism. Since sensitive subjects appeared to be able to travel beyond the confines of their bodies, it seemed to prove the existence of the soul and to show that the soul had higher powers, and could commune with the angels. Not a few people rediscovered their Christian roots as a result of investigating mesmerism, although others were led away from scriptural and dogmatic religion to something altogether more vague. Moreover, as a cure, mesmerism seemed to be treating the whole person, changing the moral character as well as healing the body. Both physical and spiritual or psychological illness were taken to be the result of being out of harmony with the invisible workings of the universe. And, to top it all, mesmerism was presented as scientific, so that you did not have to think of yourself as superstitious to believe in it. Even in the domain of religion, a down-to-earth tone of writing prevailed.

  These were the kinds of ideas that were spread by the dozens of books that were published in America in the 1840s on mesmerism. Typically they would start with a plea to the reader to be open-minded, and then go on to a short history of Mesmer's work, a catalogue of cures, documented reports of telepathy and clairvoyance, and then instructions for the would-be magnetizer. The enthusiasm, the crusading tone, of much of the writing may be seen in a single example. In Facts in Mesmerism and Thoughts on its Causes and Uses (1842) the eminent physician Dr Charles Caldwell wrote:

  Never has there been before a discovery so easily and clearly demonstrable as mesmerism is, so unreasonably and stubbornly doubted, and so contumaciously discredited and opposed … Yet never before has there been made, in anthropology, a discovery at once so interesting and sublime – so calculated to exhibit the power and dominion of the human will – its boundless sway over space and spirit.

  New England remained the centre of interest in mesmerism, but there were also, for instance, flourishing societies dedicated to the topic in Cincinnati and New Orleans (whose members, being largely of French extraction, maintained contact with mesmerists in France rather than in New England).

  Partly under the influence of the British writer Chauncy Townshend's book Facts in Mesmerism (1840, second edition 1844), which became a kind of bible for American mesmerists, orthodoxy tended to distinguish five phases of trance after the normal waking state. Deep trance was only the second such phase, after a light trance, because what interested them were the remarkable phenomena of catalepsy (a third phase) and what were known as ‘mesmeric consciousness’ (the state in which the subject exhibited telepathy and clairvoyance, which was understood as the separation of the soul from the body) and ‘clairvoyant wisdom’, which involved direct contact with the mesmeric fluid itself, so that the subject's mind was temporarily imbued with its omniscience.

  America quickly became a hotbed of hypnotic surgery. Although operations had been performed in both France and England, it is telling that the bulk of such surgical activity took place far from the centres of culture – in India (see the next chapter) and in numerous small towns around America. The explanation for this is that these places were remote from the canons of medical propriety, dictated by the academies. Their approach was more pragmatic: if it works, let's use it, and never mind the theory.

  This pragmatic attitude colours mesmerism in the States more generally. When mesmerism first appeared in Europe, it was taken up by the privileged classes. When it was introduced into America, however, it rapidly penetrated further down the social scale. This had enormous consequences on the future progress of the art in America. If it was to flourish among the middle classes, then, in keeping with the American self-help spirit, it had to serve some practical purpose. The cures were practical, but medicine was only one compartment of life. In short, it had to offer a whole philosophy of life, because that kind of self-improvement was the vogue. Hence early lecturers such as Dods dropped the odd name ‘animal magnetism’ and redescribed mesmerism as ‘the science of the mind and its powers’, while Sunderland ended up calling the field ‘electrical psychology’. In America, mesmerism became a way of exploring your potential and reframing your personal philosophy. They were attracted to its cosmology: health – not just bodily health, but health of the mind and spirit too – was a result of being in tune with the energy pervading the universe. So the mesmerists taught that mesmerism was a spiritual path, the solution to individual and to the budding nation's ills. For these men mesmerism was not a substitute for Christianity, but the means of its millenarian realization on earth. For the hundreds of ordinary men and women interested in their preaching, mesmerism was not a way of altering their relationship with God and the manifest destiny of the nation, but of establishing it on a firmer footing.

  Phreno-magnetism and Electro-biology

  With typical American inventiveness, in the 1840s mesmerism commonly became combined with phrenology, the belief that different mental faculties were located in different parts of the skull. So a ‘phreno-mesmerist’ or ‘phreno-magnetist’ would direct the magnetic fluid through his finger to the relevant part of the skull to provoke the
appropriate form of behaviour. By stimulating the destructive area of the skull, for instance, he would provoke violence in the subject. Or he would use the subject as a guinea pig, to see which parts of the brain concealed or contained which moral faculty. This inevitably gave rise to fierce arguments, as different phrenomagnetists gained different results. It is hard to tell exactly, but phreno-magnetism seems to have been an indigenous American phenomenon, which then spread back to Europe.

  Phreno-magnetism was essentially bound up with showmanship. There was little point in stimulating violence or benevolence or whatever in a subject if there was no audience there to be amazed and impressed. And, since phreno-magnetists could not make use of the same subject night after night, because collusion would then be an easy accusation, it was natural for them to make use of members of an audience.

  Another American development, equally linked to showmanship, was electro-biology. This owes its rise to Dods, who recommended and practised a mesmeric technique in which the subject held a small, bimetallic disc in the palm of his hand and stared at it with fixed attention. The theory, bizarrely enough, was that electricity thrown off by the disc accumulates in the brain. But never mind the theory – the practice was a gift to prospective showmen. No expensive equipment was needed (the disc was a kind of coin made up of a core of copper or silver surrounded by zinc), nor any special skills, and you could even get your audiences to do all the work. And so a whole generation of ‘electro-biologists’ was born, who were the forerunners of today's stage and TV hypnotists. They travelled the States with bags of discs, which they would hand out to audiences to mesmerize them and get them to manifest as many of the extraordinary phenomena associated with mesmerism as they could. A contemporary English report of a visiting American electro-biologist says:

  Dr Darling proceeds to shew his power over the sensations of his subject. For example, he deprives one hand, or one arm, of all feeling, and renders it utterly insensible to the most acute pain; or he makes his subject feel a cold pencil-case burning hot, or himself freeze with cold, or taste water as milk, brandy or any other liquid … Dr Darling further controls the memory. He causes the subject to forget his own name, or that of any other individual; or to be unable to name a single letter of the alphabet, etc. etc. Moreover, he causes him to take any object to be what Dr Darling says it is, a watch for a snuff-box, a chair for a dog, etc. etc., or to see an object named, where nothing really is, as a book in Dr Darling's empty hand, or a bird in the room, where none is. The illusion is often absolutely perfect. Again, he will cause the subject to imagine himself another person, such as Dr Darling, Father Matthew, Prince Albert, or the Duke of Wellington, and to act the character to the life.

  All good entertaining stuff – but not without its importance. An anonymous article in the 1849 Cincinnati Buchanan's Journal of Man expressed regret at the demise of the practice of hand passes and so on. Modern mesmerists, it complained, simply ordered their subjects to sleep. With hindsight, we can see that the electro-biologists’ practice was closer to what we would now recognize as hypnotism, but at the time it seemed to some as though they were ignoring the welfare of their subjects, by failing to recharge their bodies with the vital magnetic fluid. Technique apart, an unexpected consequence of their demonstrations, and perhaps of audience expectations, was that they established many of the criteria by which even today hypnotists test for susceptibility and recognize that their subjects are in a trance state. Of course, they were building on the work of their predecessors in Europe, but unwittingly they established much of the vocabulary for later academic discussion. One of the main differences from their European predecessors was that they held these phenomena to be a result of the state in which their subjects fell, whereas in Europe some of them, at any rate, were held to be the product of the action of the mesmerist's will on his subject, rather than something produced by the subject himself.

  This is our first real brush with showmanship and so it will not be out of place to mention Ingmar Bergman's wonderful film The Magician, despite the fact that this is set in Europe. The film is an intelligent, challenging and ironic portrait of life on the road for a travelling mesmerist called Vogler and his troupe in 1846. It is too complex a film to be easily summarized; suffice it to say that we are left thinking that they are probably frauds, but also in the uncomfortable position of not being entirely sure. Even though their elixirs are certainly fake, even though they are wanted by the police (we're never told what for), and even though they admit to the use of mirrors to create spiritist phenomena, in their performance they seem to alternate between mere tricks and genuine psychic feats, and it is a distinct possibility that they claim to be frauds in order to escape hostility and persecution. In a spooky scene in an attic, where Vogler takes his revenge on one of his spiteful persecutors, one is never sure if he is genuinely using mesmerism to produce hallucinations, or whether the whole thing is merely the result of clever stage management. No doubt many of America's travelling electrobiologists and mesmerists used the same combination of trickery and genuine mesmerism.

  Fiction and Fears

  It didn't take long before the usual fears about mesmerism arose in America. It took advantage of human gullibility, since it was fraudulent; it involved surrendering your will. A mesmerist might be able to implant secret commands into your mind. He could have his way with women. An anonymous pamphlet, Confessions of a Magnetizer, confirmed these suspicions. The author, claiming to be a reformed magnetizer, admitted that the rapport between himself and his female subjects or patients had laid him open to temptation, and that he had on occasion made sure that the women found him attractive too. He insisted, however, that he had never succumbed to the temptations, and merely felt it his duty to warn people of the dangers.

  Learned opinion was less polarized, not simply in favour or in opposition. Ralph Waldo Emerson found the idea of being in someone else's power appalling, but recognized that mesmerism could trigger interest in the profundities of life. Nathaniel Hawthorne thought one might be able to question a mesmerized subject about matters metaphysical and cosmological, and flirted with the idea that mesmerism might be a positive force that would help put human life on a more spiritual basis, but in The House of the Seven Gables (1851) he holds not just the idea that the hypnotist imposes his will on his subject, but also that this is why women make the best hypnotic subjects – because their will is weaker than men's. He also perpetuates the fiction that lifelong entrancement is possible. When Matthew Maule wreaks the revenge of the Maules on the Pyncheons by hypnotizing Alice Pyncheon, after she wakes up she can function normally (with no memory of having been hypnotized), but for the rest of her life she is Matthew's to command and humiliate. While Holgrave (who is also a descendant of ‘the wizard Maule’, and like all the Maules has ‘witchcraft’ in his eyes) is telling the story, he so enters into the spirit of it that he makes the gestures and hypnotic passes Matthew Maule would have made to entrance Alice – and inadvertently starts to put Phoebe Pyncheon, his audience, into a trance. Phoebe is saved from this kind of mental rape only by the self-restraint of Holgrave. In Hawthorne's real life, his fiancée suggested in 1841 that she consult a mesmeric healer for her headaches, but Hawthorne would not hear of it. Mesmerism was manipulation, and violated ‘the sacredness of an individual’. But although he despised mesmerism and any form of control, Hawthorne was fascinated by the subject and found in it a model for the kind of fiction he himself was trying to write, which would fascinate others. He wanted his readers to enter a kind of trance world of the imagination.

  Edgar Allan Poe's story ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ (published in 1845 and originally entitled ‘Mesmerism in Articulo Mortis’) provoked huge controversy. Poe plays with the idea that a dying person may be so imbued with magnetic fluid by a mesmerist that he can remain, though dead, in a kind of suspended death for months, until released by the mesmerist – at which point his body immediately turns into a pile of stinking, putrid slime
. Taking it to be factual, people seriously debated whether such a horrifying use of mesmerism was possible, and condemned it on the assumption that it was. Poe's macabre imagination had already led him to write two other short stories about mesmerism, both published in 1844 – ‘Mesmeric Revelation’ and ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’. ‘Mesmeric Revelation’ is simply premissed on the idea that a magnetized person may act as a medium or channel, revealing metaphysical truths, while ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ tells how a frequently mesmerized man glimpses in a dream-like state details of a previous incarnation.

  But all publicity is good publicity. These negative reports and fears gave mesmerists like La Roy Sunderland the opportunity to set the record straight. In response to Confessions of a Magnetizer, which had named him in person, he stressed the many diseases for which mesmerism had proved to be effective, from blindness to coffee addiction, and the important insights it gave into the capabilities of the human mind, which seemed to have latent clairvoyant abilities. The mesmerists argued that their detractors were focusing on the superficial degrees of mesmerism, the kind of state achieved in the electro-biologists’ stage shows, and ignoring the obvious interest and importance of the deeper states. To this kind of argument, learned men replied that these ‘facts’ about paranormal powers were subjective and unverifiable, merely the experiences of mesmerized subjects.